Elizabeth Smart at EO Conference: I don’t regret what happened to me

That’s a pretty amazing statement from a girl who was kidnapped from her safe bedroom at knifepoint when she was 14 years old. Yet she said it.  I heard Elizabeth Smart speak last week, the Utah teenager who in the middle of the night was taken from her room, from her house, from her family, while her sister slept right next to her.  She’s on a book tour and visited an Entrepreneurs Organization conference last week and told us about that terrible evening, her monstrous captors, and her nine months of terror.  She’s 25 now, married, and a pretty good speaker. She certainly is able to hold a room absolutely quiet for an hour.  And at the end of describing her experience with more details than you’d really like to hear, she concludes with a statement of perspective few of us could make.  I’m paraphrasing here, but Elizabeth believes that however gruesome the experience, it’s given her a platform to speak out and help other victims.  Her mother’s advice remains with me as well: the best revenge against these people is not to live a life of hate and destructive anger, but to live a good life.  Remarkable.

We like to blog about branding, marketing and lead generation, of course.  But I have no connection to marketing for this blog post!